Category: Asia regional

JAKARTA — A week after announcing tariffs on washing machine and solar panel imports, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that “the era of [U.S.] economic surrender is totally over” during his maiden state of the union address. But the speech did not go into detail on trade with Asia or about the Trans Pacific Partnership, an American-led Asia-Pacific free trade deal that Trump withdrew from one year ago. During his hour and half address, which came Wednesday in Asia, Trump briefly recycled some of his previous trade rhetoric, saying he expects it to be “fair” and “reciprocal.” Pledging to “fix bad trade deals,” Trump promised to “protect American workers and American intellectual property, through strong enforcement of our trade rules.” Trump lauded Japanese carmakers Toyota and Mazda for announcing new production plants in the U.S. He also suggested that his recently announced tax cuts could spur inward investment

JAKARTA — Despite decades of world-beating economic growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into middle class life, around 900 million more Asian workers remain in what the International Labour Organization deems “vulnerable” employment. Vulnerable employment refers to people who lack formal work arrangements or contracts, are often nonsalaried and working part-time in sectors such as agriculture or retail, and are sometimes self-employed. Such workers often can be fired without much notice and subsequently have no access to unemployment benefit.

SINGAPORE — Reacting to the U.S. move last week to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Muslim-majority countries in Asia have joined fresh calls for wider recognition of an independent Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. Speaking in Istanbul on Wednesday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo told the 56 other members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that the group “can serve as a motor” to persuade countries that have not recognized Palestine “to do so immediately.” The Palestinian mission to the United Nations lists 137 countries as recognizing Palestine. The level of recognition varies among those countries, as Palestine has not been granted full U.N. membership. Though some OIC members recognize Israel — including summit host Turkey — Asian countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

TANGERANG, Indonesia — Asian governments in countries with large Muslim populations condemned U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move its embassy to the city, with the leaders of Indonesia and Malaysia speaking out against it. “Indonesia strongly condemns the United States’ unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and asks the U.S. to reconsider the decision,” President Joko Widodo said at a news conference on Thursday. With parliamentary elections scheduled for next year, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak was more forceful. Speaking at a ruling party conference in Kuala Lumpur the same day, he said, “I call on all Muslims across the world to let your voices be heard. Make it clear that we strongly oppose any recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital for all time.”

JAKARTA — When Deddy Kurnianto* jumps on his Yamaha M3 125 every morning, pondering how his day’s work will add to Indonesia’s gross domestic product is probably the last thing on his mind. “I try to pick up as many passengers as possible, and avoid the traffic jam,” he said, signing off with a forbearing chuckle about Jakarta’s notorious congestion. In the year since he started driving for Go-Jek, a local ride-hailing service operated via smartphone application, Kurnianto has seen his income rise by “about 30%.” App-based businesses such as Go-Jek and rivals Grab and Uber operate at the intersection of the “real” or “traditional” economy and its “digital” counterpart, undercutting or disrupting existing taxi firms.

JAKARTA — One stereotype of Asian cities such as Jakarta and Manila is a stark juxtaposition between sprawling slums and gleaming shopping malls stocked with luxury goods — an image with some accuracy, going by a new World Bank report. About 250 million people live in slums across the East Asia Pacific region, which does not include India, the report found, even as the number of billionaires rose 30% per year from 2002 to 2014. Income inequality has risen across the region, chiefly driven by the growing rich-poor divide in Indonesia and China, according to data in Riding the Wave: An East Asian miracle for the 21st Century, a World Bank report released Monday.The findings suggest Asia’s continued high economic growth is less effective in curbing poverty than in past decades. “Income inequality is high or rising in most countries,” the report said.

MANILA — Four years after a colossal Pacific Ocean storm battered the city of Tacloban in central Philippines, Jerby Santo remembered how as one of around 10 million Philippine expatriates, he was waiting anxiously for news of Typhoon Haiyan making landfall at his home town. Even though the Philippines often bears the brunt of storms veering off the southern Pacific, Haiyan had prompted an unusual level of uneasiness. “I was in Phnom Penh on the eve of the storm, the internet was abuzz, what was going to happen?” he recalled, speaking at a commemorative event organized by the Newton Tech4Dev Network and De La Salle University in Manila on Nov. 9. The biggest damage of the hurricane was caused by a storm surge, a wall of seawater like a tsunami that swept inland, quickly flooding ground levels before people could escape.

MANILA — A deal aimed at protecting Southeast Asia’s estimated 7 million migrant workers is flawed, as countries can opt out of key provisions, according to a group of parliamentarians from across the region. Teddy Baguilat, a Philippine lawmaker and member of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, said Friday that the agreement affords “wide latitude to states to limit protections in accordance with domestic laws and policies.” The ASEAN Consensus on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers was meant as the pinnacle of the Philippines 2017 chairing of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which culminated in a lavish signing ceremony on Nov. 14. President Rodrigo Duterte took plaudits for the deal before handing over leadership of ASEAN to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. “I would like to thank the Philippines for its chairmanship achievements,” Lee said, prompting wild cheers from an audience that included the Philippine cabinet and prominent lawmakers such as Senator Manny Pacquaio, the iconic multiple world boxing champion.

JAKARTA — According to legend, the world’s oldest beverage came about by accident more than 4,000 years ago, when a draft blew some tea leaves into a pot of boiling water being prepared for Shen Nung, the Chinese emperor known as “the divine farmer.” Divine intervention, maybe? Whatever the provenance of that fateful gust, it was not the first farce — or tragedy — to propel the tea industry forward and eventually globalize what was for thousands of years an Asian drink. As recently as the late 16th century, a handful of Japanese Christian pilgrims in Rome prompted much curiosity among their hosts by making tea: Locals assumed at first that the drink was just boiled water, according to “Tea: The Drink That Changed The World,” a 2007 book by John Griffiths. Kakuzo Okakura’s “The Book of Tea,” a 1906 paean to tea culture, suggested that the drink — by then almost as much of a staple in parts of Europe and North American as it had long been in Asia — could be a liquid bridge between East and West. Tea, wrote the Japanese scholar, who was also known as Tenshin Okakura, “has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa.”

JAKARTA — Vast differences in living standards and wages across Southeast Asia have driven a massive rise in migration in the region since the mid-1990s, resulting in an estimated 6.77 million migrant workers sending home substantial chunks of their often meager wages to support families in poorer areas. According to a World Bank report released Monday, in 2015 Southeast Asian migrants sent around $62 billion worth of remittances to their home countries. That amount is almost the same as the gross domestic product of Myanmar for the same year and around three times Cambodia’s. Remittances are a vital part of several countries’ economies — making up 10% of GDP in the Philippines, 7% in Vietnam, 5% in Myanmar and 3% in Cambodia, though the majority of migrants from the Philippines and Vietnam work outside Southeast Asia.